I would have been a terrible nurse. I see blood and have this visceral reaction that’s almost dissociative. Mercifully, it doesn’t seem to apply as much if my kids are injured. In the moment I can focus and mend them. The adrenaline crashes later. My own injuries and those of adults? Like I said, I’d been a terrible nurse.

I had been trying to carve a stamp with an old multitool I found in the walls of my house – when my hand slipped, I realized what a bad idea it had been. I didn’t need stitches, but I did leave a trail of blood. And despite my near out-of-body experience from it, I got the wound bandaged, the bleeding stopped, though I didn’t calm until it was covered. It healed perfectly – there’s no scar, there’s no remaining pain. It was despite of myself. It was also the only way to cope in the moment.

It’s like anything else – If you are going to be someone who fixes things, who improves things, or who works to make the world just a touch better, you have to be willing to look straight on at whatever it is that you’re working to improve and get through it. You need to focus despite being overwhelmed by scale or size or sorrow. Squeamishness can’t defeat you. A firefighter with a debilitating fear of flames will let buildings burn down. A social worker whose broken heart burned them out will stop meeting situations with the compassion required. It’s like the Nine Inch Nails song: the way out is through.

I think about this a lot at work. Dealing with social problems requires sacrificing the innocence one may have about the extent of sorrow in the community. It requires cultivating an inner peace in a tumultuous outer world. I used to be someone who couldn’t relax unless I felt like everything was OK. But everything will never be OK, there are too many of us for that and the bigger picture has problems greater than the ability of one woman to fix on her own. I learned to draw emotional boundaries around myself to retreat to.

I think all of us in the field sometimes daydream about occupations where the stakes feel lower. Jobs which protect one’s ignorance about how rough suffering really is, assuming you’re lucky enough not to be the one suffering. I could leave human services but escaping the sorrow doesn’t make it go away. It does feel purposeful to keep chipping away at it. Which means steeling my heart so I can look at it directly and move through.

There’s no other way. It’s normal to feel tired sometimes.